SANTA ANA, California – October 1, 2002 – Magazine prepress specialist J Jays has brought together technologies from Vio Worldwide and Markzware to build a seamless offering called 'Check-n-Send'. The solution which is based on a JDF integration with MarkzNet and Vio, goes beyond straightforward preflighting and digital delivery. In the first customer implementation, J Jays has constructed and will host an RBI-branded website specifically for RBI advertisers . This is the first step in making similar opportunities available to other publishers and their clients. Check-n-Send is a service which enables advertisers to pre-flight advertisements and deliver them online, free of charge, with an attached JDF-compliant job ticket. J Jays has focused on creating a user friendly environment that is designed for all advertisers, however small, not just those delivering the more complex and expensive color ads. Check-n-Send handles display, classified and recruitment advertisements, and includes help within the site, plus a link to J Jays' website for more comprehensive hints and tips on file creation. In addition to proving that JDF will stand up to production deployment in external workflows, J Jays' solution for RBI takes online advertisement delivery several important steps forward: Improved Control & Receipt of all formats: The degree of control exercised by J Jays over the quality of the jobs permitted to be delivered is far-reaching, and crucially extends to application files as much as PDF-formatted jobs, including the pass4press standard, given the capabilities provided by Markzware. Advertisements are preflighted, and any which are deemed by J Jays' parameters setup in MarkzNet to have major integrity or accuracy problems have to be repaired before they can be sent. Optimized automation: Once the advertisement has gone online and met the specifications, the advertiser fills out a unique job ticket for the relevant title. In a major advance, the introduction of a customized job ticket per magazine title according to the needs of J Jays and RBI enables each title to optimize automation. The job ticket contains all the fields that J Jays and RBI need the sender to complete in order to achieve the maximum degree of automation through the downstream processes. In this sense, the project is a serious step towards computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). Time and cost saving: The degree of automated filtering and categorization required by J Jays from the Vio software enables processes to be streamlined to reduce cost. Each job is recognized as belonging to a particular magazine and routed automatically to a Vio inbox for that magazine. This avoids the costs of using more expensive database-style applications to achieve the same effect. Heightened awareness: Heightened awareness is achieved because specific J Jays production staff and RBI account managers for different titles can be notified by email about the successful delivery of an advertisement for their particular magazine, along with job ticket details. In the initial deployment by J Jays, only jobs with major problems are blocked from being delivered. Others with minor problems arrive with a 'red cross' indicator in the Vio inbox meaning that they are accepted by J Jays but need a little work, and a green tick means they passed. Both RBI and J Jays hope that, as time passes, advertisers will learn from the amount of information provided by the Check-n-Send solution on how to avoid generating any warnings. Downstream compatibility: Use of JDF for the integration means that all the data being passed between Markzware and Vio is available in JDF format for subsequent use by JDF-enabled processes within J Jays or RBI. Similarly, special data collected in the customized job tickets can in the future be used by downstream systems. Early adoption: Eric Lambert, Director – Production & Prepress of RBI, was looking for a solution for advertisers that had to be available to all, regardless of hardware or software, and be easy enough to use so there would be minimal requirement for technical support. He comments, "When a customer uses the RBI Check-n-Send website, I believe they will find it very simple and straightforward to use, and customers who have used it so far certainly seem to concur with this view. I suspect rapidly we will think whatever did we do without it." The first major advertiser to use this solution was Robert Holmes, Senior Designer of The European Marketing Group, on behalf of his client Volvo, who seamlessly sent an advertisement straight through the system destined for "Commercial Motor" magazine. Homes says "the RBI Check-n-Send is very impressive, easy to use and to install as well as being an extremely efficient way for us to supply pre-press ready digital artwork."